A new Facebook feature for the broken hearted

In the age of social media, we’ve had to learn a whole new set of etiquette standards – who to friend and unfriend, what is and isn’t appropriate to post, and dealing with privacy. One of the trickiest events to navigate is a relationship breakup. With our relationship statuses publicly displayed for all to see on our Facebook profiles, what used to be a private matter between two people can quickly become a public spectacle.

There’s also the issue of getting over the breakup. When you can see exactly what your ex is getting up to and who they’re spending time with simply by clicking onto their Facebook wall, it can be more difficult than ever to move on. However, we don’t always want to completely erase someone we used to love from our lives by deleting everything about them from our social media networks. Fortunately, Facebook are introducing new tools to help the newly-single to move forward with minimal online drama.

When you change your relationship status to “single”, Facebook will now present you with a “Take a Break” option. This will give you the option to reduce the amount of information you see about your ex, without the need to delete every photo or unfriend them. You will no longer see their posts in your newsfeed and you won’t receive reminders to tag them in photos. You also have the option to limit what they can see of your posts. They will not be notified, so they’ll never know that you’ve decided to temporarily hide their updates unless you tell them.

You can undo the settings at any time, so if you decide to be friends again once the dust of the breakup has settled, you haven’t burned any friendship bridges by unfriending or blocking them. The feature is currently only available in the USA, but if it proves to be successful, Facebook will be rolling it out around the world.